Prospect Park files Ch 11 Bankriptcy Protection

[John]

That is the truth

[chicklitsandfantasies]

Passions moving to DirectTv seemed more like a ploy by Direct TV to get new subscribers. Its not like their 101 channel had an highly rated original programming on their then(it was mostly concert series) and they still don't now. They canceled it 3 months after the move. I will give them credit for promoting the show though because as a Direct TV viewer I constantly saw the ads for it.

I agree.

[marceline]

Unfortunately Passions couldn't deliver enough viewers for DirectTV and AMC/OLTL couldn't deliver enough viewers for PP. Neither speaks well for the genre.

[amybrickwallace]

I couldn't agree more. Have we heard anything from SAG/AFTRA or the crew union (don't know what it's called) about this?

[amybrickwallace]

Yeah, the ABC studios where GH tapes is on a street called Prospect, so I guess that's where they got the name.

[Vee]

IIRC, AMC and OLTL had half-decent numbers which could've continued to build, provided they had a stable foundation and funding. The problem is PP was clearly running this thing like a roadside caravan behind the scenes, and didn't have the funds to properly mount and sustain the shows they were producing. They thought they'd hit up ABC with a lawsuit and somehow keep the thing going. That's not a solution, it's not a rational approach and I said so when this suit first reared its head.

I wish I could be surprised to hear that Erika, Robin, Jen Pepperman, Tuc Watkins and surely many others - Ginger Smith, God knows who else - have not been paid. The fact that they have not is profoundly shameful. I have the utmost support for the two shows that were produced, which I thought had a unique, fresh sensibility and approach, and wonderful teams in front of and behind the camera (that means you, Jared Kaplan! I see you creepin'). I cherish what I got from them and I'll never not be proud of those. But as for PP, the parent company, and its higher management, my response is the same as it's been for many months now: Forget it.

The tragedy of the situation is that the product was good, as were the people writing and producing it on the floor, IMO - it was what soaps needed to thrive for the future. It was simply sponsored by bankrupt people. I don't see why there's a debate about this. Pay these people their money and let this mess go.

[amybrickwallace]

I knew when the whole PP thing was announced in late 2011 that it was going to be a disaster. As sorry as I was to see two long-running, much-loved soaps go off the air and so many lose their livelihoods - I wished they had just given both shows nice, happy finales and just let things go. Let everyone move on.

[marceline]

Agreed. You and I have been of like mind on this (which is still weird for me). Regardless of the BTS stuff, I loved the product and nothing is going to change that. My only wish now is to keep the rights out of ABC's hands (and for the cast and crew to get paid of course.)

[amybrickwallace]

Proof positive that ABC, in its way, is just as screwed up as NBC has been the past decade or so.

[DRW50]

OLTL's ABC finale was [!@#$%^&*]. I'm sorry about what PP did to the cast and crew, but I'm glad that the end of the show was not Trevor St. John drooling into a gag. Besides, everyone wasn't going to be able to move on anyway, as Ron and Frank went on to massacre much of OLTL through GH.

AMC's finale was decent, but PP AMC was good product and did nothing to take away from the show's past.

[amybrickwallace]

Just a sad situation altogether. I feel really bad for the cast and ESPECIALLY the crew who have been working without pay. What about insurance, 401ks? You'd figure the unions would be all over this by now.

[marceline]

I feel like some people (not referring to anyone here) have blacked out just what a nasty piece of work ABC could be over the years. I suspect a lot of people chalk that up to Frons and think that since he's gone, all the fuckery left with him.

[amybrickwallace]

I guess Zucker, the since-ousted head of NBC and who is now screwing up things at the helm of CNN, was a bigger name than Frons, because who really knows him besides soap fans?

[allmc2008]

Not to mention that pre-Frons ABC wasn't exactly heaven either but like you were saying people are now expecting ABC to be like pre-Frons ABC, which again, was still pretty messy.

[Vee]

I had little to no problem with OLTL's finale on ABC. I thought it was a great ride those last two weeks, and I thought they did what they needed to do, what most soaps forget to do - give a sense of the serialized drama going on with excitement, with the characters you love, with those families, with that world continuing on even if you're not there. They also gave some happy endings, some closure; not all the endings were exactly perfect or exactly what I wanted, but I liked most of them. I thought they did it up very well. OLTL still felt alive.

My problem came later on. Not with the crossovers to GH, which unlike others I had little problem with - I didn't find Todd, John or Starr to be terribly OOC in Port Charles. I liked Téa's visit, I liked the ongoing OLTL material. What I had a problem with was when OLTL, on its own, with its own cast and stories, made a concerted effort to return on its own steam, divested of its prior showrunners, and the GH team seemed eager to block it. And GH did step over the line on creative control of the OLTL characters, PP had a right to cite them for that. Further, it was near the end of that cycle that they started writing the OLTL characters solely around plot, and then they were clearly getting poised to make Natalie, Blair, Clint, etc. subservient to the denizens of Port Charles as soon as PP's option on the rights dropped. I also thought it was unnecessary to kill off both little Hope and Téa's son - all for an unending GH umbrella plot which is still not over, where you might be able to tie Todd and Victor Jr.'s story on OLTL into a GH storyline with Helena, Heather, Obrecht, etc. where Trevor St. John might agree to return sometime in the next two years. I thought that was shitty to do to their fans, especially the ones who were not necessarily canny enough to know how Ron's plotting works. (I'm sure RC intended to resurrect Victor, and probably both those little kids "someday", Robin-style - but he didn't get around to it.)

Nobody needs to refresh my memory about the evils of ABC, or any of the other networks and how they've treated their soaps. I agree with all of it, I understand it. I think the way ABC treated Agnes Nixon was shameful, I think the way they handled the cancellations was shameful, I think the shame goes back a number of decades and numerous instances. I think AMC 2.0 was better than it's been since probably the '90s, with the exception of maybe Bianca's coming-out story and a couple other periods in the early 2000s. And I think OLTL regained a sense of proportion and a more mature tone for the first time in absolutely ages; it reminded me a bit of the '90s too. But the fact is that there are relatively few major conglomerates out there that are not only willing to take a chance on the serialized "daytime" drama, but also uniquely understand what it even begins to require to produce a daytime drama, weekly, year-round. PP tried to do it, they couldn't; they couldn't even do it seasonally. Maybe someone else could. But I personally would've been perfectly fine with ABC running PP's shows in their daypart, or ABC co-producing them, because the simple fact is that ABC has those deep pockets. ABC isn't going to fail to pay the actors, the EPs, the crew, the Connecticut Film Center, SAG. That is a cold and harsh calculation but it is a necessary one, and it's one I've remembered to keep in the back of my mind since before the new shows aired on Hulu.

I'm all for soaps getting out from under the thumb of contemptuous network suits that hate the genre, hate the product, want them gone, etc etc. I believe in that. I believe in getting away from the same tired misogynistic, bigoted patterns of thought that keep breeding the same people, the same stories, the same attitudes. But I also believe soaps aren't going to have a future unless you learn to wed new technologies and fresh ideas and perspectives with the existing machinery and institutions that know how to produce these shows.

These shows got underway again as fast as they did because they went back to a lot of the old crew and people who knew how to put them together. The problem is they didn't also have the same money. To the best of my very limited knowledge, AMC and OLTL were produced - collectively - for a fraction of GH's budget, and they looked better than GH. But PP still didn't have that money to keep the lights on or pay people. A network like ABC does. And if it's that cheap and it will draw eyes, a network like ABC could just as easily have co-produced it or partnered on it, and not run out of the necessary funds. So long as those shows had some level of creative autonomy outside of ABC's interference, I could give a [!@#$%^&*] who airs it. And yes, there's always going to be some oversight from any network, and every network has its multitude of sins. But networks valued soaps once, and they're trying hard to not lose money on shitty talk/variety pilots at the moment - so you may have no choice but to roll the dice.

I don't have a problem with the shows being on ABC because ABC can pay for them. What I have a problem with is what some fans or press seemed to be going for, which is the idea that all you need to run three soaps are two dudes who run General Hospital. When a former line-up of soaps is reprocessed into some sort of "super-soap" polyglot, some sort of mutant amoeba made up of a lot of different parts from three unique shows with unique characters and history - Ron Carlivati is not the worst writer in daytime, but he's not nearly as brilliant as he thinks he is, and he can barely run GH at the moment. Whether they were to somehow return to the line-up or simply be appropriated by GH, I don't want to see two lost soaps plus GH all run out of one voice, one mind, one style and one taste, especially when I find a lot of GH's taste sorely lacking these days. I think that kind of one-voice-fits-all assembly product is a recipe for sinking into obscurity. It might make people geek out on Twitter but it's not gonna save the soaps. It's inside baseball.

If ABC really wants to produce AMC and OLTL again - and I doubt they do at this juncture - I have no problem with letting them. And I wouldn't be surprised if Agnes Nixon didn't have a problem with it either, if they came to her hat in hand and said 'do what you want as long as it's thirty minutes and 30 million a year.' The only thing I had a problem with was when they blocked them from returning on their own, and with the idea of running them all out of one shop in California.